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year 5, quarter 3
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[attr=class,bulk] As Kuja had promised, he did indeed lead Barnabas to the large desert city of Aljana. It stretched up in the distance, looking much as the cities of Dhalmekia had. An oasis in an otherwise unforgivable desert. It had been only half a day’s journey on the back of the chocobo he had taken, but the heat still left the king thoroughly exhausted by the time he crossed the gates into the city proper. While Barnabas did plan to speak with Kuja more, the arms dealer had mentioned that he had business to attend to first. That left him with time to learn more about the land where he’d found himself.
It had been a long time since Barnabas had to act carefully in a new city. Not since the days of Veldermarke’s rule had he entered somewhere so meekly, yet what he needed most from Aljana was information. He wasn’t here as a conquering force. At least not yet. That would have been foolish before he had any resources to speak of. He wasn’t even confident that he could still fully prime into Odin after giving his power to Mythos. Barnabas truly was starting from scratch again as he had when he was a boy. No, he was worse off than that even. At least then he’d had the survivors of the Circle of Malius and the newly created Sleipnir. Now he had little save the blade of Odin.
That should serve him well enough at least.
After stopping to let his chocobo drink at the river that ran through the city, Barnabas asked for directions to the market street. He had hoped to purchase some supplies with the small amount of money in the bags strapped to the chocobo that he’d taken, but as he unfortunately learned, most businesses were closed this week. "Hariq Rami,” they’d called it. A week long fast spent in celebration of the gods. Nothing else could have so quickly earned the king’s approval. Even if they worshiped false gods, it at least appeared that the city of Aljana had its priorities straight. They knew their place in the world and who shaped their destinies. They were already better than the majority of the cities in Valisthea.
Since shopping was out of the question, Barnabas stabled his new chocobo for a nominal fee and made for the Temple of the Gods instead. Perhaps he’d feel something of Ultima there. If nothing else, he might learn more about this place. It appeared to be a simple building with statues in the courtyard being the only thing depicting its importance. Barnabas inspected the images of their gods closely, sighing as he found no sign of Ultima among them. He hadn’t really expected it, but it was still disappointing to recognize nothing from his homeland. Perhaps the inside of the temple would yield more results. Turning away from the statues, Barnabas pushed open the tall double doors and strode in. Perhaps they’d have some special ceremonies going on for their holiday.
Irritatingly tautological as it was, coming to inhabit a largely unexplored world came, inevitably, with not knowing a whole lot about it. Granted, it was not truly unexplored, much less largely at that: as far as Mikkel could gather, one could find people in nearly every nook and cranny of said world – the key was knowing where to look. But the old world… He knew that like the back of his hands, and he knew what to expect from it anywhere. Anybody looking to start anything funny from leagues away could count on him to turn his head in their general direction before the first test. And if Mikkel had to disappear for a while, he knew exactly where to go. But this, this was different. He could secure a cozy seafront workshop days within his arrival, but anything beyond Torensten was an incognita – and to an extent, even within it. Had something queer enough appeared within his radius, there would have been no way for him to see it coming, nor did he have anywhere he could go if the worst happened. Quite frankly, that had been the premise of perhaps too many of his little excursions, to the point that thinking about it drained a lot of the fun out of them, but it was what it was.
His itinerary for today consisted of what passed for a city in the middle of the Reikinto Sands. Aljana. All that Mikkel knew about it, he had read it on the old almanacs that he would often salvage – or steal. Some of the information was outdated. It must have been. Also, the pronunciation still eluded him, which was obscenely aggravating. Aljana only counted a few thousand souls within its walls. Next to Torensten’s millions, it paled. Next to any other settlement one could possibly find in the area, it was gargantuan. Mikkel had approached it by air, flying over it from far up high enough that any onlooker could have reasonably mistaken him for a vulture, and then landing at a safe distance from the city walls. It took him twenty minutes by foot to reach them again. He then crossed the gates under the stupefied eyes of the guards…
…but why? His camouflage was flawless! His armour covered him down to his last bone! And for what his helm and beard could not cover of his skull, Mikkel had crafted a nice little gizmo that consisted of a fake nose and black, bushy eyebrows and moustache attached to a pair of spectacles. Yeah, alright, they might not have been the right colour, but as far as he was concerned, he looked as alive as the next guy. More alive, in fact, that the city itself. Its streets more deserted than what stood outside the walls and many of its shops closed, Aljana lay mostly silent before him. He saw very few people out and about, and… Ah! Mikkel could see a number of them converging in the same direction. So he followed them. He then remembered the almanac. Throughout the year, Aljana could only have two reasons to look like it was at that moment: Yunazif Sakhr, and Hariq Rami. As the people were heading towards what Mikkel recognised as the Temple of the Gods, it was most likely the latter.
Inside the temple were all the people he did not see in the city proper. Families, for the most part, with a few couples, the odd widows and widowers, and a couple of small groups of people that couldn’t have possibly been related by blood. Not many folks on their lonesome, beside himself and some other bloke who had just made his way in. Heedless of the crowd – what hushed conversations he could hear at all did not interest him – Mikkel drew closer to the walls. Inscriptions studded them, but he could not read them, not quite yet, for they were written in a language of yore, and he knew from experience the number a mere handful of centuries could do to the way people spoke and wrote. Now, pictures, pictures were universal, even when the style was a bit wonky and flat and even naïve, which was for the most part just an ostensibly politer way to say unsightly. “Hey, that’s Ifrit alright,” he commented, because it took even the most mugged (like gifted, except the exact opposite) of artists some effort to make that fiery horned janitor unrecognisable. “Where *is* this one anyway?”
[attr=class,bulk] The inside of the temple was crowded, which was to be expected if it was a national holiday. Barnabas carefully made his way to the edge of the throng of people, since he didn’t particularly like being stuck in a crowd. Truthfully he didn’t much enjoy dealing with people at all unless it was on a battlefield, but he didn’t have a choice now that he was on his own again. Gathering information would have been so much easier if he'd still been able to call on Sleipnir, but creating an egi seemed to be beyond him now that he’d given his powers to Mythos. After more than half a century of the commander’s company, it was oddly quiet without him.
There were inscriptions alongside the murals that dotted the temple walls, but unfortunately the writing seemed to be native to Zephon and Barnabas couldn’t decipher it at all. He turned his attention to the paintings instead. A man in full armor stood between him and the closest mural, but he was strangely short. Over his head, the king was easily able to make out the pattern of a horned eikon cloaked in fire. The figure was different enough from Valisthea that Barnabas had barely taken a glance at one of its statues outside, but now he was witnessing their god in full color. The king felt himself grow still in recognition just as the man in front of him uttered the name Ifrit.
“Pardon,” Barnabas stepped up to the armored man’s side, though he kept his feverish gaze on the mural. “The beliefs of this city are new to me, but you mentioned Ifrit. Does that mean the eikon has been seen in this region?” The possibilities were endless. Perhaps Mythos had been led to Zephon as well, or the people here knew of Ultima’s true form. Either way, Barnabas was exactly where god had meant him to be. He only felt ashamed that he had ever doubted why he had awoken in a strange land. Clearly Ultima had great designs for this place.
For the first time he actually looked down at the shorter man next to him, and for once Barnabas found himself speechless out of sheer confusion. Most of the stranger’s face was hidden by his helm and his long bushy beard, and the rest consisted of some kind of fake nose and mustache attached to a pair of frames. Even more disconcerting, Barnabas was close enough to see that there didn’t appear to be eyes behind the glass so much as empty dark sockets.
“...What exactly are you?” Perhaps that wasn’t the most eloquent question when he’d been looking to learn more about Aljana and Ifrit, but he was honestly curious. He would have thought the man was akashic if he hadn't heard him speak. Only dominants could become akashic and still retain that much of their will.
And there it was, the other bloke who had just made his way in, as he had just put it to himself before deciding that he didn’t care. He still didn’t, to be completely honest; there usually was very little of interest in lone men in places where all around you stood families and groups of friends. Travellers – the man’s choice of clothes stuck out enough to make that a safe assumption – were not necessarily an exception. Of course, the irony of his own thoughts was not lost to Mikkel. Yet, at least there, in that faraway temple and in broad daylight, that also happened to be the whole point. He was not there to be noticed. He was not there to talk to people or be talked to. And if he really wanted to talk to people, he had to be the one to initiate the conversation! He glanced to the man, who was staring at the bas-reliefs. “Beats me,” Mikkel said with a shrug. “I am a foreigner. The one I know burns books, and no mistake. Haven’t seen the bloke elsewhere in these lands either.” There was a moment’s hesitance as he contemplated stepping away. In truth, he was part expecting and part hoping the other man to do it first – there were no further points to press, no topics or a scratch of a reason to continue talking. Now, in the great toolbox of storytelling, there were sentences that were so worn with use that one would expect them to crumble as soon as you picked them up. Outdated, tired little phrases with chips and woodworms in their handles well past any delusion to get any work done with them. As far as Mikkel was concerned, “or so he thought” was the crown jewel of the category. As a matter of fact, Mikkel did not stop thinking it at all. What was happening was that a man had just elected to harass him in a public space for no reason, because he didn’t like the answer he was given or maybe because he was simply one of those cuckoo homeless people for which you could never tell if the homeless was the direct consequence of the cuckoo or the other way around. After all, Mikkel could not be at that moment anything but an elderly, very human and very alive traveller. Honestly, he would even take people realising that he was just a really tall dwarf. “Shsh!” He hissed in instinct, which he regretted immediately. “Alright, big brains, you have figured me out. Just keep your voice low! I may look like a regular traveller, but what I am…” He paused, scanned the temple with a few cautious glances, and waited for the handful of people who turned to look at them to lose interest. “…is the almighty Shiva,” he concluded with the confidence of somebody who meant to say “Ramuh” and fully believed, if only for a brief moment, that it was exactly what he had just said. Mikkel froze, which if anything was at least thematically appropriate, and let out an exhausted groan. “Hold on!” He raised a finger to the man’s chest. The die was cast. “Now that you know my secret, please let our paths part as quickly as they crossed, for I must warn you, traveller….” Mikkel turned his back on the man and took one meaningful step forward. “…I am not single.” And ran for it.
[attr=class,bulk] The shorter man declared that he wasn’t from Aljana either, so he had no idea if Ifrit was in the area. That was a pity, but maybe it was to be expected if the eikon mostly lived in their legends. He said something absolutely strange about the god of fire though that made Barnabas raise an eyebrow as he finally glanced away from the mural. “He burns books.” It wasn’t a question so much as a flat statement of disbelief. There was either a story of Ultima circulating here that he’d never heard before, or the man was being a nuisance on purpose. Barnabas was inclined to think it was the second.
As he noticed the strangeness of the creature’s disguise and pointed it out, the man shushed him before proudly declaring himself to be Shiva. Despite the full beard hanging from his face and his obviously male voice. For once, Barnabas found himself properly speechless. Not from boredom or a wish to disappear onto the battlefield, but from pure confusion. He had no idea what to make of this man, and that feeling only increased when the stranger informed him that he wasn’t single before fleeing through the crowd. He’d almost certainly meant that he wasn’t alone, but the wrong wording only added to the absurdity of the situation.
The king stared after him, wishing that he had any subordinates at all who could go in his place. Living alone had its benefits until you had to do all the dirty work yourself. Dealing with people, that was. He was quite willing to dirty his hands in battle, but talking had never been his strong point. He was quite alone in Zephon though, which meant Barnabas had to chase after him himself. He had a feeling this conversation would be a painful one.
Steeling himself, Barnabas strode forward and did his best to catch up to the man before he could vanish into the temple’s courtyard. “Stop,” he called out as he reached the top of the steps. The armored man was below him and currently level with the statues of this world’s eikons. Barnabas itched to just call his sword and take the answers he wanted, but they were in a heavily populated area. He was supposed to be keeping a low profile until he had talked to Kuja again, so hopefully they could keep this civil.
“You have been granted undeath, yet you retain the burden of your own will,” he stated, furrowing his brow as he tried to make sense of that. Perhaps it was something unique to this world. Kuja had told him to forget the rules of Valisthea after all. “How is that possible? I don’t suppose that you’re a dominant. Whatever relation you claim to Shiva.”
Of course the human followed him. He was a bloody human, and a lone one at that, and not once in sixteen centuries did Mikkel see a lone human just shrug their shoulders at a fleeing chap and carry on with their own lives, their own businesses. If you were lucky, you got the dainty maidens who were generally unaware of what legs were for, beside extra parts to be shaved, and who just kind of whispered at you to wait with an arm outstretched in your general direction. And even they had that tiniest hint of a chase instinct.
Mikkel did not in fact stop when the human asked him to. He reasoned that, worst case scenario, he could try to get him for sexual harassment and for being a dirty, dirty theophiliac – which just meant you were attracted to deities, but any word ending in -philiac sounded nasty enough that he might as well toss that in. Surely there must have been a priest who was going to feel called out and thus overcompensate with zeal in fistfuls.
He kept running until he heard the human follow up. He then halted mid-stride, remaining with one feet hanging in the air behind him, recomposed himself, and carefully turned back to face him.
“You benighted donkey, no one granted me undeath but myself. And it is with undeath that comes the purest, most unrestrained and real freedom you could possibly imagine.” Mikkel's voice had glaciers in it. “Yet you call that a burden, interesting that. Now, human, I should like to be the one to ask you one question.”
He straightened his glasses-nose-moustache-combining contraption back into place, insofar as one could argue it to have any place about his face to begin with. “How is my sexual life any of your business?”
[attr=class,bulk] Barnabas hadn’t been entirely sure that the stranger would actually stop without force, but he froze in a comical abrupt pose when he was addressed. The king didn’t fully understand why the man had run away in the first place, but perhaps he thought that he would encounter trouble now that he had been recognized as an ageless being. That wasn’t without merit either—humans rarely reacted kindly to what they didn’t understand. Barnabas however was just curious as to what exactly the man was. He was so different from the undead akashic of Valisthea, and the more he talked, the more Barnabas was certain that wasn’t a good thing.
He raised an eyebrow at being called a ‘benighted donkey,’ but what followed the strange insult was interesting enough that he let it slide. “Oh I think I could imagine it,” he answered with a slight twitch of his lips. From the brief glimpse he had gotten of the man behind his questionable disguise, he must have been old indeed for all the flesh to have worn from his face. Barnabas himself had only been akashic for roughly 30 years now, and he hadn’t visibly aged in that time, let alone started to deteriorate. Perhaps the creature across from him counted time in centuries to have gained that appearance.
“You obtained the gift yourself?” He couldn’t make sense of that when he thought of Valisthea, so he tried to let those preconceived notions go. “I’ve always known God to have a hand in it. I take it that wasn’t the case for you.” A pitiable existence, but Ultima might not even exist in all of the worlds connected to this one. The god had been so entwined with Valisthea that he was likely not the origin of all these other worlds. That was a troubling realization that Barnabas would need to unpack later. For now, the man declared that he had a question of his own. It was as nonsensical as the rest of his actions, but this was the one that broke the king.
Touching his forehead, Barnabas let out a rare laugh. Oddly enough, he understood the confusion if the stranger’s world didn’t have Dominants who channeled the eikons’ power. But he also didn’t feel inclined to clear up the mistake when the man was already hostile. “What am I doing here?” He asked himself instead. “Truly this is a punishment.” Ultima had clearly denied him paradise after he had indulged himself in his final battle against Mythos. And now he was trapped here, doomed to suffer fools for eternity.
A man who truly knew his contradictions, that one. First he called free will a burden, only to imply familiarity with the freedom that came with undeath the very next moment. He then chased him into the temple grounds, and promptly proceeded to claim the situation to be a punishment for him. It was the type of astonishing mix of self-centredness and stupidity that Mikkel only thought teenagers to be able of. He would know. Ardwas perished without ever making it past that pitiable stage.
“You tell me, kid. You came up to me, asked me all kinds of questions, and then chased me here.” His arms drew a semicircle as they spread. “It looks to me that you are the one punishing yourself. You were raised religious, weren’t you? Surrounded by priests who made you feel sinful as they spread the word of god, I bet. So where did they spread it?”
Mikkel briefly lamented not having those small dolls for illustrative purposes on hand – though he did have them at home, mostly those made of straw for dabbling in a bit of voodoo, which would have been perfect for this precisely because, rather than in spite of, their actual purpose. It wouldn’t have even been the first time he’d use them. After over sixteen hundred years, you started to recognise some patterns in your encounters, no matter the uniqueness of each individual.
If the kid was truly familiar with the nature of undeath, certainly he must have been aware of it himself, if only because the first thing most people – even the most clueless of mortals – associated with undeath was extreme longevity, if not quite immortality – not always, and especially not if you weren’t good at being undead.
“Ain’t really a gift if I obtained it myself though, now wouldn’t you say?” He said while confirming to himself that, as he had been suspecting, the kid was on the contrary quite ignorant instead. How much could somebody who lead a life expecting things to just plop down from above by the grace of some god have possibly known? “See, the secret is that if you trust in yourself, believe in your dreams, and follow your star…”
There was a pause for suspense.
“…you will get sweet, sweet, sweet fuck all. I studied, I practiced, I dared. If there’s anything you can call god where I come from, then I am probably as much of a part of it as any blade of grass in my old front lawn.”
[attr=class,bulk] The man pointed out that Barnabas had followed him out of the temple, so if anything, he was punishing himself. That was fair honestly, though the king had to question the new nickname a little. “Kid…?” He certainly wasn’t the oldest human around, but he would have had silver hair at this point if Ultima hadn’t turned him akashic. “Though perhaps you have a point on the rest.” He had yet to hear a single word from God since setting foot on Zephon, so it was best to stop dwelling on whether or not he’d displeased him during the final battle with Mythos. There was little he could do at this point even if it were true after all. He could only offer atonement when and if Ultima demanded it.
The undead stranger also made the observation that Barnabas was raised religious, which he saw no harm in confirming. However he chose to willfully misunderstand his last comment on the priests of the Circle of Malius. It didn’t bear addressing. “Ultima created humans to obey him, so we were taught that free will was a sin. It was not in his original plan. Undeath—or turning akashic as its known there—is the least sinful state a person can exist in.”
His lips twitched a bit as he looked over the man across from him with his fake nose and mustache. He was clearly something else entirely. “I suppose that’s why I was curious about you. Why I was surprised that you’ve retained your will. You’ve taken everything from Valisthea and turned it on its head.” Which was troubling in its own right. Even if Barnabas followed Ultima’s will here and sought to unleash another aether flood, did that suggest that it wouldn’t have the same effect? This conversation was giving him a lot to mull over if nothing else.
The man shared a little of how he’d come to be this way, and it truly did sound as if it had been through his own efforts. He also confirmed Barnabas’ fears that some other worlds did not possess a god at all. “...I see. You were a scholar of sorts and came upon the answer yourself.” Despite his current comical appearance, the king looked at him differently now. Not quite with respect, but with a new understanding.
“You remind me a little of the man who killed me,” Barnabas remarked with a faint smirk as he glanced over at the statue of Ifrit that graced the courtyard. “He showed me the strength that can come with a will. ‘Would that I had not cast aside my own,’ I said then.” He wasn’t sure if he still agreed with his dying words or not now that he’d been granted a new life. Then again, it was difficult to let go of beliefs that he’d held since childhood.
“Well, that is interesting, because you see: akashic, in my world, refers to a type of oven-baked flatbread that is served with no cheese toppings, which is the most sinful state for a flatbread to exist in.” It was either that or a type of thorny shrub, anyway. “I always say: you can skip the tomato sauce and still make it work, but never the cheese. It’s just wrong.”
He waved a dismissive hand. Maybe it was a thorny tree. Honey was involved somewhere too, he was pretty sure.
“Hold on though, I need to get this straight: your Ultima needed some servitude, and decided that the best way to go about it would be by creating humans. Except, humans have free will. And that’s bad. So, Ultima tells them that it’s a sin, and if they’re undead, they’re less sinful. He began stroking his beard thoughtfully. “Look, I’ll even fill in the blanks here and assume that they need to be the right kind of undead, that is to say those that are made undead by somebody else and are thus controllable. Is this like, real, or is it just mythology? Please tell me it’s just mythology.”
In hindsight, that was a very stupid question, albeit not due to some ontological lack of sense so much as the choice of person to whom he had just addressed it. Of course, he expected to hear, it was real, and even if the man had neither born witness to his world’s own cosmogony nor heard the tale from Ultima himself, there was very little a strong enough faith feared.
“If free will is intrinsic to humans, Ultima should have known about that from the very start, and could have thus chosen to create anything else to serve him – if man can manage that with simple machinery, I don’t see why a god couldn’t. If free will was instead added onto humans, then it stands to reason that it could have just as well been removed from them from the very start, instead of simply requesting that they do not exercise it. I mean, that is in itself a bit of a paradox, isn’t it: even complying with such a request would require agency.” It had to be mythology. You could not even argue ineffability there: it was his interlocutor himself who said that free will was not part of Ultima’s original plan, and even then, nobody would ever convince Mikkel that ineffability wasn’t anything more than a rhetorical smokescreen for the failures of those alleged higher beings who couldn’t tell their heads from their arses if you gave them a map. “If Ultima failed where man succeeded with a fraction of the effort, then Ultima is hardly worthy of man. In other words, you’ve been worshipping a complete tit your entire life: congratulations.”
He stopped talking to allow the man to soak in his words and allow him to react… what was the word? Maybe organically? Organically felt fitting enough. Still, there was one more question that Mikkel had to ask.
“Ah, so you’re an undead as well. An acacia– an akashic. So, did you actually cast away your free will, or are you just telling yourself that to convince yourself you’re a good… Ultimian? Ultimanian? Ultimaniac? Lastie? Not familiar with your terminology here.”
